Malevich. Gerry Souter
storehouse. The battle was ended when my arrow hit the factory leader in an eye, but his arrow passed over me. We fired point-blank at each other.
That was a true fight. When I came home at the end of that day, my father punished me very hard. I bore my disgrace, but, deep inside, I felt myself as a hero.”[3]
When Kasimir reached the age of eleven, the peripatetic life of the steppe roads and the company houses and apartments at the refining mills was becoming a strain. The family had grown and Severyn Malevich settled and worked at a plant in the village of Parhomovka, which bordered three areas, Kharkov, Poltava and Sumy, and was midway between two of the Ukraine’s most important cities: Kiev and Kursk. The village had a five-class school and Kasimir became a town boy going to school until 1894. The people in Parhomovka remember him as a poor boy who never stopped asking questions.
The Harvesters, motif: 1911, version: 1928–1929.
Oil on wood pannel, 70.3 × 103.4 cm.
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
II. The Discovery of Art and His Experimentations: Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism
Discovering the “Art” within him
Apple Trees in Bloom, motif: c. 1906, version: end of 1920s.
Oil on canvas, 58.5 × 49.5 cm.
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Kasimir was twelve years old and had prepared watercolour paints and made his own brushes. He had practised drawing horses in different views placing them in landscapes and with people. He had painted them whatever colour he had mixed, working with a friend who also had ambitions to be an artist. It was here he saw his first professional artists who came from St. Petersburg to decorate a church. Kasimir wrote of this very special event:
“At this time we lived in a small city, Belopolya in the Kharkov province, in which I found a comrade very devoted to drawing. My friend was far ahead of me in manufacturing paint. He had flat stones on which he ground them. We made paints not only of various kinds of clays, but also from some powders. We prepared both watercolour and oil paints. We did not prefer oil paints and worked mostly with watercolours.
One day, my friend came running to my house, pulled me outside behind a gate and, being out of breath, whispered to me, ‘I’ve heard my uncle tell my aunt that the most well-known artists are coming here from St. Petersburg to paint icons in the cathedral.’”
Kasimir and his friend had never seen real artists before. Each day, they eavesdropped on their elders’ conversations and listened at keyholes to find out when the artists were scheduled to arrive.
Finally the three artists arrived by train. The parishioners were more concerned about repairs to the cathedral and gathering money to pay for the work than about the artists. Kasimir and his friend were desperately interested only in the artists. They needed to sneak into the church and watch how these well-known artists worked. For days and nights, the boys examined the windows of the church to find where they might squeeze through. Kasimir’s friend was a well-known resident of Belopolya and his job was to find out where the artists were lodging. Unfortunately he refused to ask his uncle about them, because it was a secret.
The boys spent time walking up and down the main street of Belopolya, Kasimir on one side and his friend on the other, peering into people’s faces, searching for the artists. Any stranger was visible at once in Belopolya. Morning and evening, they stood by the main bakery and the deli market, but the only people on the street were familiar residents of the town. Finally, they decided it was easier to stay by the cathedral.
They tried taking turns when each had to go home for dinner, but finally they took food with them and stayed by the cathedral full time. But there was no sign of the artists.
A few days of fruitless waiting passed but on one hot evening, after a swim in the river, they suddenly saw boys and girls peering in the windows of a house located on the outermost street of Belopolya. They joined the other children and discovered, “…Many small pieces of ‘fabric’ (as we named it) with heads of boys, girls and also cows drinking water painted on them hanging on walls all around the brightly illuminated room. The artists walked in the room. There were three of them. We examined them as an unknown rarity and were amazed by their long hair and special shirts (smocks?).”
After a sleepless night, the boys hurried back to the house before sunrise. The sun rose and the cows were driven out, but the artists remained inside.
“At last, the window opened and an artist looked out on the street. We stepped aside, pretending that we were interested in kitchen gardens nearby. In an hour a gate opened and the artists appeared before our eyes. They had boxes on belts hung upon their shoulders, umbrellas and other strange things. They were dressed in shirts, bluish trousers and boots. The artists went out of town; we followed behind them. There were fields under rye and wheat with mills on them and a forest of oaks in the distance… We sneaked in the rye where we were not visible, but on the wheat field we had to creep. As soon as the artists reached a mill they settled down, set out their boxes, opened umbrellas and began to paint.”
It is instructive to read Kasimir’s words and imagine how these artists, hung about with their paint boxes, easels, water cans, food and wine baskets and dressed in their painter’s smocks must gave looked so alien. Where the artists from the city aware of the two stalking boys and did they put on a show for their amusement? This is a rare look at artistic culture shock.
“Carefully and thoroughly, we examined any detail,” Kasimir went on, “…nothing escaped our attention. We desired to see how and what they were going to do. Holding our breath, we crept on our stomachs in the most cautious way. We managed to crawl up very close. We saw colour tubes from which paint was pressed and that was very interesting. A sky, a mill, and so forth showed up gradually on each ‘fabric’.
There was no end to our excitement. We spent two hours lying there. Then, the artists put aside their work and gathered together in the shade of the mill to have breakfast. They spoke loudly in Russian and laughed. Taking advantage of this occasion, we crept away through the rye the same way back and then, when we got out from the field, we ran away at top speed.”[4]
The experience of seeing these three artists at work creating paintings was so heady that Kasimir and his friend considered running away to St. Petersburg with the men when they returned from working on the cathedral. But their enthusiasm sobered when they considered running out on their parents, and then the two youngsters were separated when Kasmir’s father packed up the family yet again and moved to a sugar factory in Volchok in the Chernigov Province, thirteen miles from Konotop.
Once again, Kasimir was among new town people, but this time his drawings and paintings attracted the interest of the factory engineers, who prevailed on Severyn Malevich to send his son to art school. Kasimir took up their pestering as he copied pictures from the magazine Niva (“Wheatfield”). This magazine was much like the later New Yorker, a three-column format with poems and illustrations by Russian artists scattered among the pages. Later, when the Bolsheviks came to power, the magazine was shut down.
To silence the constant badgering from his son and his colleagues, the elder Malevich wrote a letter to the Moscow Art School, but instead of mailing it, he hid the letter away in a drawer and three months later announced to Kasimir he had heard from the school and there was no place for his son in its classes.
But Kasimir’s exposure to art had possessed him. The scene of the artists painting at that mill on the steppe continued to haunt his thoughts. He wrote in his 1918 memoir:
Church, c. 1906. Oil on cardboard, 60.3 × 44 cm. Private Collection.
A Garden in Bloom, motif: c. 1906, version: end of 1920s.
Oil